Tricky Words in this week's OVI
Visiting a large trade fair can be a pretty overwhelming experience at first, with several huge halls or vast pavilions covering an enormous area and containing hundreds of massive exhibition
stands, each one with a whopping design and colossal technology, not to mention the immense numbers of people either staffing or visiting the stands. That in fact is what I'm interested in now, how
to translate the Slovak "stánok". If it's for newspapers and cigarettes, I would say "kiosk", and if it's at the fruit and vegetable market I would say "stall".
Then I thought that "výstavný stánok" was standardly translated as "exhibition stand", except that recently I've been hearing "booth" as an English equivalent. Well excuse me, but I associate that
with public pay-phones, and there must be a linguistic link between "booth" and "búda" or "búdka" (through the German "Bude"), and that just doesn't sound gigantic enough for part of a mammoth
trade fair.
ANDY'S WORDSHOP
English words for "small rooms". Going on with "booth", I associate that with "telephone booth" or "toll-booth", the place where they collect "mýto", or maybe a "changing booth" in a clothes shop,
where you can try on new garments in private. That is also called a "cubicle" (that originally meant a very small bedroom in Latin), which also means the place for a single WC in a public
rest-room, or where you get changed (change your clothes) at the swimming-pool.
A "cubby-hole" is a small space, possibly sunk into a wall, or part of a kitchen dresser ("kredenc") where things might be hidden. "Špajza" is "larder", from the French word for bacon, a place for
keeping preserved food. A "den" could be for animals ("brloh"), but it could be for men to play cards and drink whisky in, or for children to hide and play, and keep secret things in ("bunker").
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